National Poetry Slam Finals 2014 - "Say No" By Olivia Gatwood, Megan Falley

Spoken by Olivia Gatwood and Megan Falley

It is summer the smell of beer and hotdogs are
sweet in the air like the national anthem.

It's baseball season! And you love baseball and 
going to these games with your boyfriend.

And today it might be the perfect day

As you watch the little boys with their sticky 
grins  on their fathers shoulders.

As you watch all the happy people on the 
Jumbotron.

And then you see your own face and your
boyfriend down on one knee.

And then you see an engagement ring so big it 
blinds the screen.

And when when he looks at you, like he caught 
the home-run ball

And then you look up and see the thousands of 
people in the stadium rooting for you

To do it. To say yes!

This is for the woman who says no.

They will boo you as you run down the stadium 
steps because it will never be the wedding aisle.

Someone will throw popcorn at you because it will never be rice or confetti.

Someone will catch your wrist because it will never be the bouquet.

They will call you a villain, a bitch.

They will call you worse

They will curse the day you learned any other 
words besides

Yes

And sorry

The ones that think themselves kind will ask why
you couldn't just fake it for the screen.

Why you had to make "no" a public thing

There are little girls in the audience after all and 
you denied them their

FUCKING fairy tale

Someone will tell you now ex-boyfriend how 
undeserving you are.

How any sane woman would have loved that proposal.

And you must have not been shit anyway

Probably crazy, and he will nod

And somewhere a man calls a woman from 
outside his car window

"Hey sexy! Come closer"

She says "no"

"Cunt, you're ugly anyway!"

Somewhere a woman argues for a higher salary

And her coworker call her a bitch in the break 
room

Somewhere a woman's friends signed her up for
a makeover show

The audience laughs when she says she loves 
her sweatpants

The audience laughs when they throw them out 
anyway

Somewhere a girl is told that if she doesn't want 
to hear the song about rape

Don't listen to it!

But it follows her in the supermarket, the gym,
the girl's clothing aisle 

And now she knows all the words

Somewhere a woman is told to get naked at frat 
parties, she refuses

A boy with a kind smile puts his arm around her,
offers her a beer filled with the magic that erases

No

Her vocabulary, Iam 16 in the managers office 
of my first job

My boss, whispers a list of the things he will do 
to my body

I say "no" and he threatens my next paycheck.

My long term boyfriends bed, after having sex 5 
times already that morning

I say "no" and he says

"This probably isn't going to work"

Then Connecticut a girl is asked to senior prom by
someone other than her boyfriend

She says "no" and his knife blooms a corsage in 
her chest

California, a young virgin boy thinks about you
and the ones like you

The ones that said "no" and the audience that
boos

And the poor sucker who was owed something

then denied it.

And he cocks his gun



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